Why Did Europe Conquer the World? Political Economy, the Military Revolution, and the Great Divergence

In 1914, Europeans, who a millenium earlier had been the poorest and politically the weakest denizens of Eurasia, were rich and in control of 84 percent of the world, either directly or in former colonies they dominated.  To account for this surprising reversal of fortune, historians tell the story of the “great divergence” in wealth and the “military revolution” in gunpowder technology, but the relationship between these two processes and their ultimate causes have remained elusive.  To uncover the ultimate causes, I have formulated a simple economic model which isolates the political and military conditions that generated improvements in the gunpowder technology.  In western Europe these conditions applied continuously from at least 1400 on; elsewhere they didn’t, even when there was frequent warfare.  That is why western Europeans eventually came to dominate the gunpowder technology, which was ideally suited to conquest and naval predation in areas far from home.  Why then were political and military incentives so different in Europe?  There the answer lies with the unforseen impact that events centuries earlier had on early modern outcomes throughout Eurasia.  That is the ultimate cause behind the European conquests, and the conquests, it turns out, then helped create the world wide divergence in incomes and wealth.  The relationship between the military revolution and the great divergence ends up being complex, with causation running in both directions.  The military revolution contributed to the great divergence, but the divergence made conquest even easier.